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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

futureoflife.org

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Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than this. Llama models trained off of GPT 3.5/4 can run on a Raspberry Pi totally offline with similar levels of quality - taking all the best parts of the original model. Even if all major AI companies halted the upper tiers of model progress right now, you're still gonna need the entire public to stop assembling these together. It's quite possible just a whole bunch of these lesser models architected th…

GPT-4 is still not dangerous. Given the rapid progress trajectory though, GPT-5 and later which may be developed in a few short years could very well be, esp in the hands of a smart sociopath. (History shows there are many who could cause real-world harm. Imagine them armed with a 24/7 agent with expertise in dozens of fields.) See these predictions of AI in 2025 by an OpenAI insider and a former DeepMind research en…

Yes. And graphene will change technology, cryptocurrencies will replace fiat money, we've been through that several times. Autonomous cars will be everywhere. We will use VR for everything.

What OpenAI insider could have said? That ChatGPT is a glorified search engine with categorization algo that copy stuff from several websites and put it together (without providing source of its revolutionary result, which makes this even less useful then wikipedia).

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#922
post #813

Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…

> Climate change mitigation, which more closely resembles AI safety in both complexity and (lack of) barriers to entry, has been sporadic, inconsistent, and only enacted to the extent... Climate change mitigation is the perfect example. Nobody is doing anything, nobody seems to care, everyone cheats with ridiculous carbon credits or carbon offset vouchers made out of thin air, etc. It's likely the planet will become…

This is silly, unless you think the earth will turn into Venus.

The majority of time earth has had no ice caps. Primates evolved when the polars where covered in trees, not ice. A warmer planet will support more biodiversity not less.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#923
post #876
post #841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some a…

I really dislike this sentiment. Planets can become entirely inhospitable to life. Planets themselves have lifespans. Earth herself has in the past suffered near misses, e.g. 90%+ extinction events. It took billions of years of evolution to produce us, the only species ever to exist with the ability to reason about, prevent or ameliorate large extinction events (such as those caused by asteroid impacts), effect conse…

The planetary crust contains life 30 kms down. Even if the surface was sterilized and the oceans boild away, life would return from the life in the crust. It would take a long time to "rediscover" the innovations like chlorophyll, but in the end, life would recover completely.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#924
post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point is not what ai does. the point is how bad actors use ai to manipulate voters and thus corrupt the very foundation of our society. images and texts create emotions and those emotions in the electorate is what bad actors are after. just look at the pope in that Prada style coat. so how do we in a world with ai generated content navigate "truth" and "trust" and shared understanding of "reality"?

How is that different from Bernie Sanders effectively brainwashing an entire generation that communism is good?

Looks like somebody is confusing communism with socialism.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#925
I think a moratorium goes too far and is not effective. What we need is a commitment to use AI responsibly and to the benefit of everyone.

I asked ChatGPT for ideas and it suggested this AI Manifesto for Humanity (prompting and visual highlights by me).

https://gist.github.com/miraculixx/b24c84a0c253183206cd6ec37...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#926
post #922
post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Climate change mitigation, which more closely resembles AI safety in both complexity and (lack of) barriers to entry, has been sporadic, inconsistent, and only enacted to the extent... Climate change mitigation is the perfect example. Nobody is doing anything, nobody seems to care, everyone cheats with ridiculous carbon credits or carbon offset vouchers made out of thin air, etc. It's likely the planet will become…

This is silly, unless you think the earth will turn into Venus. The majority of time earth has had no ice caps. Primates evolved when the polars where covered in trees, not ice. A warmer planet will support more biodiversity not less. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

It’s not about the lack of ice, dingus. the danger is in climate change shocking ecosystems such that they trigger a systemic collapse that we can’t contain or manage. there’s basically no timeline where food supply wont be impacted and I’d like to hear your cavalier attitude about climate change then.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#927
post #813

Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…

> Climate change mitigation, which more closely resembles AI safety in both complexity and (lack of) barriers to entry, has been sporadic, inconsistent, and only enacted to the extent... Climate change mitigation is the perfect example. Nobody is doing anything, nobody seems to care, everyone cheats with ridiculous carbon credits or carbon offset vouchers made out of thin air, etc. It's likely the planet will become…

> It's likely the planet will become hostile to (human) life long before AI will be able to do us any harm.

The race is on then.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#928
post #737

Best response to the current "AI" fad driven fear I've seen so far (not my words): These AI tools cannot do things. They create text (or images or code or what-have-you) in response to prompts. And that's it! It is impressive, and it is clearly passing the Turing Test to some degree, because people are confusing the apparent intelligence behind these outputs with a combination of actual intelligence and "will." Not o…

Actually, it is quite possible to get LLMs to actually do stuff. See ChatGPT Plugins.

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#929

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 is still not dangerous. Given the rapid progress trajectory though, GPT-5 and later which may be developed in a few short years could very well be, esp in the hands of a smart sociopath. (History shows there are many who could cause real-world harm. Imagine them armed with a 24/7 agent with expertise in dozens of fields.) See these predictions of AI in 2025 by an OpenAI insider and a former DeepMind research en…

Yes. And graphene will change technology, cryptocurrencies will replace fiat money, we've been through that several times. Autonomous cars will be everywhere. We will use VR for everything. What OpenAI insider could have said? That ChatGPT is a glorified search engine with categorization algo that copy stuff from several websites and put it together (without providing source of its revolutionary result, which makes t…

Interpolation and forming internal abstraction from training data to solve problems are large parts of most knowledge work. Recent language models can do them sufficiently well it can help automate many kinds of tasks.

Check out cases of people using GPT-4 to help automate their coding (on Twitter and elsewhere). It's not ready for harder problems but we're probably just 1-3 key ideas away from solving those as well.

To solve harder coding problems, one needs to be able to extrapolate properly. When an AI can do that, it's basically AGI and can probably solve any cognitive problems a human is capable of. Combined with its other qualities like massive communication bandwidth, self-replication with ease, travel at the light speed, it will be ready to take over the world from humanity if it wants to.

Wikipedia cannot do the followings which even current AI can:

* Minerva: Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/06/minerva-solving-quantitati...

* What can AI do in 30 minutes? https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/superhuman-what-can-ai...

For that matter, most signatories of the petition (and myself) were never persuaded by most other "revolutionary" ideas you mentioned above.

See the names and accomplishments of the signatories at the bottom part of the page: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...

Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

#930
post #737

Best response to the current "AI" fad driven fear I've seen so far (not my words): These AI tools cannot do things. They create text (or images or code or what-have-you) in response to prompts. And that's it! It is impressive, and it is clearly passing the Turing Test to some degree, because people are confusing the apparent intelligence behind these outputs with a combination of actual intelligence and "will." Not o…

Best response according to you.
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